In the past, generally, enterprises or other institutions producing commodities and/or services provide customers with information on the commodities and/or the services by using typically leaflets, direct mails, electronic mails, and/or web advertisements. The information on commodities, and/or services includes discount coupons, information on new commodities, and information on discounted sales in order to promote the purchasing will of the customers. In order to promote the purchasing will of the customers, however, distribution of information tailored to preferences with specific customers to the specific customers is more effective than distribution of the same information to all the customers. In order to distribute information tailored to preferences with specific customers to the customers, it necessary to provide a system for inferring the preferences with the customers from purchasing records of the customers and provide the customers with information tailored to the preferences. For more information on such a system, the reader is suggested to refer to references such as Japanese Patent Laid-open No. 2003-248774 and Japanese Patent Laid-open No. 2003-308267.
This system provides customers with information on commodities, to which a coupon is applicable in accordance with purchasing records of the customers and electronic coupons each showing a discount rate. Thus, a customer can obtain a coupon showing a higher discount rate for a commodity purchased by the customer frequently.
In the system described above, however, the only criterion used for determining a preference with a customer in a process to issue a coupon to the customer is the purchasing records of the customer. That is to say, a preference with a customer is determined on the basis of commodities purchased before by the customer. Thus, the criterion used for determining a preference with a customer does not include consideration of a commodity not purchased by the customer before even though the commodity may be of interest to the customer.
It is thus an object of the present invention, which addresses the problem described above, to provide a preference-information gathering system, an information searching apparatus, a user portable terminal, a passed-place-information sender apparatus, a preference-information gathering method, and a computer program capable of gathering information on every commodity and/or every service, which are each of interest to the customer, as information on customer's preferences.